Gutenberg Changelog 120—WordCamp US, Automattic Telex, Gutenberg 21.4 and 21.5, and the need for more blocks

Gutenberg Changelog 120 Sarah Norris and Birgit Pauli-Haack
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Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog 120—WordCamp US, Automattic Telex, Gutenberg 21.4 and 21.5, and the need for more blocks
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Birgit Pauli-Haack and Sarah Norris discussed WordCamp US, Automattic Telex, Gutenberg 21.4 and 21.5, and the need for more blocks.

This episode dives into the ongoing evolution of Gutenberg, from AI-driven tools for easier block creation to the expansion of core blocks and enhancements stemming from vibrant community input. There’s a strong focus on practical improvements for developers and better experiences for end users, all while staying plugged into the latest WordCamp happenings and the broader future of site editing in WordPress.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special Guest: Sarah Norris

JavaScript Developer / Core team rep

WordCamp US

WordPress Developer Blog

Gutenberg releases and work in progress

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 120th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about WordCamp US, Telex, Gutenberg 21.4 and 5 and also we will discuss that we need more blocks. Maybe. I’m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate and full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. 

And after a long break, Sarah Norris joins me again. Yay. She is a co-core team rep, a core contributor to the Goodwill Project, and developer and designer working for Automattic. Thank you so much for taking the time and coming onto the show again. Sarah, how are you today? And maybe you can briefly outline what you have been working on for what might be coming to WordPress 6.9.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Hello. It has been a really long time. It’s good to be back. Yeah, I’m good. I’m looking forward to autumn, my favorite time of year. So for 6.9 I’ve mostly been working on new blocks. Yes, all the new blocks. I’ve been working on the Accordion block, which was called Accordions but is now called Accordion Singular. Also I’ve been looking over the new tabs block. There’s a PR going for that that I’m really interested in, looking at maybe getting the table of contents block stabilized as well. I think there’s a lot of work to do there, but I think it’s, it’s quite well rounded, well outlined so we can get stuck in there. And then I’ve also been working on a new terms query block as well. So that’s it’s like the query loop block but for taxonomies.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wow, it sounds exciting. Awesome. Awesome. So you’re the right person to talk about. We need more blocks later on so we’re coming to the announcements. 

Announcements

Automattic Telex

So at his keynote at WordCamp US, Matt Mullenweg, you probably heard it all already, dear listeners announced experimental AI tool called Telex, and it can be used to build new blocks with a plain English language prompt so you don’t have to speak code. So try it out. I’ll share the links in the show notes. And Ray Mori from the repository has quite done a good rundown of all the reactions for Telex on Twitter and all that. So I’m going to share this with you. But it’s a really exciting tool and it’s also experimental, so it might not have the outcome that you want, but you might get new ideas from it. So have you tried it out, Sarah?

Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: I’ve been following the development closely and trying it out. It’s amazing. It’s so much fun to use. Yeah. Definitely recommend people try it out. You might not get what you expect, but I don’t know if you ever do with AI, it’s all about what you put into it, isn’t it? And see what you get. Especially for new blocks. People should try it to build new blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So did you build a new block?

Sarah Norris: I built a few ideas, like a few silly things. I haven’t tried it on any new core blocks yet. Maybe that’s the. The next step. Maybe I should try it on all these new core blocks we’ve got coming up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, but I’m more interested in the silly things than the crazy things or in the quirky things. But did you try?

Sarah Norris: What did I try? I’ve tried like some random image generators, just like some random color stuff as well. Trying like different colors, different patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Maybe I should add some to the new live tool so we can get them in the library.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There’s a library maybe coming up. Okay, well, it’s the next current step. Yeah. Kind of thinking about, okay, if so many people build blocks and we want to kind of showcase all those ideas, if they’re ready enough so other people can use them, then you probably want to have a site for that. That’s totally true. Yeah, true. 

WordCamp US

Anyway, so speaking of WordCamp viewers, the talks are almost all uploaded to WordPress TV, so the team is really amazing. And there were fantastic talks at the showcase day as well as the other days. And we had about a dozen talks about AI in all kinds of flavors. And I only want to kind of point out three of them. One was for developers. Adam Silverstein’s talk Unlock Developer Superpowers with AI is definitely worth a look on the rerun as he tested quite a few new tools and also gave a great rundown on his approach and how he works with it. 

So Adam is a former Googler and he is a core committer on the WordPress project. So yeah, he’s definitely out there ahead of, well, at least me. I don’t know about Sarah, but definitely ahead of me, so. And for nondevelopers, John Maeda’s talk was a fantastic introduction in how to think about AI in his cozy AI cooking talk as a keynote on the third day. And then if you want to be amazed of what’s happening in other areas outside of development, but in other areas of science, I highly recommend Professor Adam Gazzaley’s talk on the new era of experimental medicine, AI and the brain. And he talks about how his lab at the University of San Francisco did a lot of brain testing and figured out a way to replicate and have a feedback loop, a close feedback loop to reactions on certain things. So and what they actually did was they created a video game to help people with ADHD. And that’s for prescription, but also available for adults who are kind of having a bit of a cognitive decline in the later years and want to kind of keep a stop to that or at least delay it. So it’s really an interesting talk. Totally not related to WordPress at all. So yeah, have you watched any of those talks?

Sarah Norris: I haven’t this week. I’ve been concentrating on basically building the terms query block. But all three of these I really want to watch. They sound really good, especially that last one that sounds super interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, the resources that he mentions in his slide deck and all that, you can really kind of go down that rabbit hole on a Sunday afternoon and kind of learn more about that. And then for block and block related talks, there were so many and each covering a different angle. I have a list in my Weekend Edition 38 that I would kind of where I said I would want to watch it and even if I’m not getting into the talk, I will keep a list of that for the reruns. But if I wanted also three of them is one is Michelle Hunt’s Building Experiences, Design systems, User experience and full site editing. And she really brings it home in talking about Atomic Design, which was a topic two years ago in San Diego or three years ago even, and then applying it to WordPress and themes and blocks and also creating a design system as well as guardrails for users. That’s her user experience piece that if you have too many options you confuse users and they don’t need them, but you can build guardrails around it and curate the experience quite well. 

Mary Ann Aschenbrenner is from a small agency and she talked about how she moved websites from classic theme to a block theme and what the steps were involved. And yeah, some decision making process there, really good. And then Block Composability the Past and the Future with Seth Rubenstein and Max Schmeling, and they talked about the remote data block coming out of WordPress VIP and they open sourced it, and that is how you can connect the Gutenberg editor with an outside data source like Google Spreadsheets or Airtable and bring that data in live. So when it changed the data on the other sites. Yeah, it’s updated the website and use block bindings and interactivity API to pull it all into a page and blocks that you can put on a page. So it’s really interesting what comes out of that this year in WordCamp US. So have you looked at the remote data block yet?

Sarah Norris: No, I haven’t, but that sounds amazing. It almost sounds like zapier but. But for. For the editor. Yeah, that sounds really cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that was the idea about it, that you don’t have to create blocks for that. You kind of use that one block. Yeah, that has a lot of tools in there and then you can pull them in. It’s really interesting. So yeah, but of course everyone is at a different stage in their blocks journey, and it’s difficult to recommend a talk without knowing more about the needs but so I will share in the notes the link to all the talks of WordCamp US. I think right now they have two or three pages already uploaded so you can kind of look at them but don’t forget it and let times go past. It might also be something to put on your list for Christmas vacation days or Thanksgiving days instead of other things maybe. 

Community Contributions

So what’s community contributions? It seems there’s more new Momentum at the WordPress Developer Blog because apart from the What’s New for Developers by Justin Tadlock, there were four more articles published since we had our last Gutenberg Changelog recording, and two of them are by Justin Tadlock. 

One is a little controversial as a stated title, you don’t need Theme JSON for block theme styles. When you want to need or step away from using theme JSON for styling themes, this guide will walk you through the best practices of using style sheets instead. You will also learn from the article that Justin actually really likes theme JSON, but he wants to pick you up where you are and if you don’t don’t have a real good handle on it yet, you have alternatives and options. And the second one is in view of what’s coming to WordPress 6.9 is registering custom social icons for Gutenberg, and it’s a new filter hook that’s coming to the next release, and it’s learn how to use it to register your own services for social icons block. So his example is IMDb, that’s the movie database or Ko Fi, that’s buy me some coffee kind of donation place. I used it for my next edition of the Gutenberg Times theme where I want to have an archive page for my podcast, and I needed the icons for all the podcast directories where you can find the Gutenberg Changelog because only Spotify was on there, and there are so many others that are there, so. And Pocket Cast is already in there, but all the others are not. So I built them with that new tool for my new plugin. So it’s really interesting. So if you have other needs, you can do it yourself. You don’t need to wait for Core to put them in. 

And Troy Chaplin also he published a series on refactoring a multiblock plugin to build smarter register cleaner and scale easier. So if you have a multi block plugin, it’s kind of gives it a cleaner structure, support all block types and also a smarter registration and bundling of your assets. I think it’s a very good tutorial for the next stage of your plugins. And he also has a second post in the same realm is about implementing namespaces and coding standards in WordPress plugin development. This post got a lot of comments and suggestions from other people, co-developers and others. So it’s definitely worth looking into because namespacing, auto loading and linting for your multi block plugin is definitely something you want to find out or how to do this. So shout out for both authors for taking the time to put those tutorials together for other WordPress developers. And dear listeners, make sure you never miss another post of the developer block again. Subscribe to the blog. Anyway, I’m not asking you, I’m not putting on the spot when you’re gonna write for the developer blog. But yeah, think about it. We’re open to ideas.

Sarah Norris: I’ll have a think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Say again?

Sarah Norris: I’ll have a think.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 21.4

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, have a think. So, which brings us dear listeners to the Gutenberg releases in the last four weeks. We are starting with Gutenberg 21.4. Do you want to get us started, Sarah?

Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. What we’ve got first for 21.4. 

Enhancements

So in enhancements we’ve got a new server side render hook.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I’ve put some question marks on it because I need you to explain it to me a bit.

Sarah Norris: I mean, I’m not sure I can do that. So I think this is a. It’s a really nice refactoring job. So we had. Well, we still do have some data fetching logic in a server side render function and this has been refactored into a hook called useserverside Render, and it basically gives consumers more control over the block content when they’re using the server side rendering technique. I think we did have this functionality before, but this makes it much easier and more flexible for consumers to absorb the block content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so when you say consumers, you mean extenders who use it in their block plugin, right?

Sarah Norris: Yes, yeah, that’s right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s not me as a consumer of Nutella or something.

Sarah Norris: Nutella Hook though, would be amazing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a new blog.

Sarah Norris: Use Nutella.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Use the Teleservice. No. Oh, what a mess. So we have quite a few things that are concerning the data views. It gets a real good polish now and some great features in there. So the first thing is that there is a control command plus click for multiselection in the table layout. When you have data views in a table. So you can click all the rows that you want to use for bulk edits or something like that, which is really cool. It’s also a feature that is in the old WP admin. The second one is the data form select box to have custom empty options. This is actually really cool because then you have a no selection and it doesn’t disrupt anything of the workflow. Yeah, I got this all my life of web development and forms that when you have a dropdown you need an empty one. So if it’s not a required field. So they can unselect things.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, Very easily forgotten because how often do you actually build dropdowns as well? So every time you build one it’s good. Oh yeah, I need an empty option.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s now built in to have a custom empty option if you want it. You want to do the next.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. What’s the next one? So I’ve got support group by in the table layout. So this, this is adding support for the table to be grouped by field, isn’t it? So it means that when you’re viewing a table, it can be grouped into separate sections and each section will have a heading. Yeah. But I guess depending on the content, it makes it much easier to consume that content and then. Yeah, each section has a table row with a heading. Yeah, that helps separate it out. Nice and neat.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it makes it a little bit easier to find all the stuff that you need. The next one is that it’s now use responsive images for the dataview grid layout. So if you’re on a tablet, the images are smaller so you get more things on the screen as well as the mobile. You can use that in mobile as well.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know about this PR actually. It’s very, very cool because it’s. It allows you to to pass a maximum width to the images in the grid view. Because I think previously it was using the largest image or one of the largest image sizes. But that means like if there were a lot of images, this is saving like literal megabytes on every grid view. So that’s. It’s really, really cool. Good, Good pr. Good performance. PP.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Next one is allow data views empty state to be customized. Oh yeah. So this is if. So if you’re like loading a data views component, if there were no results previously, I think it just would render just a white screen basically, which is an empty data view component. But this allows you to pass in like a default empty state. So if you’re listing pages and no pages are part of the search results, then you can add something like a no pages found message. But it’ll be styled nicely and be centered and will look much better UX than a blank screen, basically.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Then nothing.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah, then nothing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I also like the. The last one is a data form is now a bootstrap validation for required and type checks on the input. And that’s right now for text input, email, integer and boolean field types. Boolean. Yeah, I never knows how to pronounce it. How do you pronounce it?

Sarah Norris: Boolean.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Boolean. Boolean. Boolean. Yeah. Other people say boolean. Anyway. Yeah, I really like that. So now you can have your data forms automatically kind of validated and at least for those types I think more is coming there as well. So yeah, if you use the data views for your plugins, you can actually have now good user input handling as well.

Sarah Norris: Next is the block library section and then we have the cover video block Add drag and drop support for poster uploads. So this is so for videos you can add a poster image for HTML videos. And this basically just allows drag and drop functionality. So we can drag these images into the poster section when you’re editing the cover video block basically makes it much easier to add a poster.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Drag and drop is always fun most of the time. Yeah. And it’s not only for the video block, but it’s also for the cover block that has that video that’s also then pulled in. If there is not enough bandwidth on the page to show a poster instead of the video, and only when you click on it, the video kind of plays. And then we have updates to the file block. Two of them. One is to use the mime type to determine if a file is a PDF and the other one is have the nature of Feature detection for PDF support. So that would also give the PDF support means have it embedded on the page as an option or also have thumbnails and all that kind of thing. So yeah, those are kind of great enhancements.

Sarah Norris: Next up is the block editor section. So we have the list add keyboard shortcuts to indent, outdate, outdent. So this adds a keyboard shortcut to the tooltips. Why can’t I say tooltips? All these words that you don’t have to say out loud. And then you’re forcing me to say. When you hover over the block toolbar for the list block, you’ll now get some helpful tool tips that tell you about the indent and tab keyboard shortcuts. Basically.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it’s been a while that it actually is the tab to indent on the list block. But it wasn’t really that widely known because it took a while to get it in there and now you can. On a single list item you can use the tab to indent it. But now you also know it by hovering over the tooltips or getting some tooltips. When you hover over the block toolbar, there is the icon to indent and outdent. And now it also has the tooltip for use the tab dummy kind of thing. All right. Oh, the write mode is also has quite some updates in the last few Gutenberg releases. This one also only has one that it adds the shuffle style to the write mode toolbar on a container block. So if you have a block, if there is a style variations for that particular block, you can you get this little color drop to select those style variations that is actually coming out of the zoom out mode that was already in 6.8.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, it’s very cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s totally cool.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, it makes it really easy to. I know that’s the whole point of it, but it makes it very easy to switch between the styles. I think it’s something that we don’t really think about, especially when you’re building for the editor as well. But as soon as you see it in action, it’s just like, oh, this is unlocks loads of functionality just in one click. It’s very cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Next up is the component section. Got one in here as well. So this is the text control improve theming support. I think this is a little PR for making the border and placeholder colors themable for the text control component specifically. So it means that if you switch the theme, the border and the placeholder colors will also change as well as the other colors related to text control.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then there’s a block binding update on the date block. It now allows block binding, so yay. Now you can have the date block. There’s a date block or post date, for instance. Yeah, you can. Yeah, okay.

Sarah Norris: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you can. Or recording date. Yeah, or something like that. You can connect it to a block binding and make it all follow all the date things in WordPress like location and localized formatting and all that. Block bindings also gets a little bit more wider usage. Opens up for wider usage during 6.9. I have not yet put a whole good research in there, but I’ve done some testing and it works really, really well also to. To add it to an audio block and all that.

Sarah Norris: I can tell you one thing, although it will probably be for Gutenberg changelog 21.6 or 121, but I’ve been using block bindings. I’ve been using block bindings for the terms query block as well. And it was unbelievably easy to implement. Just like so much kudos to the people who’ve been working on block bindings. So I’ve used it to expose term data so we can absorb that in the new blocks for the terms. And it’s just. I don’t know, I’m just blown away by it really. It just makes so much sense. Makes everything so much more flexible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I use the block bindings too. I registered a separate source for the block bindings for my podcast archive page. Yeah. Because I wanted recording date and stuff, the podcast description and the logo as well as for every episode recording date and the download link just in there in the query loop. And it really worked. Yeah. The audio blog. I’m still debugging it because of course it’s all my fault. But it really works well and I’m so happy that I don’t have to write new blocks. And I can use a plugin that creates all those fields and has their own template, but the templates are not for block themes. So I can create my own template and add all those blocks bindings and put it into a plugin. So it’s really cool.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So many more options opening up with block bindings.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. What’s our next section now?

Documentation

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I scroll down to the documentation section of the changelog and I just wanted to point out two things. One is that the Playground CLI is now preferred over the WP now when you use it on any of your projects for playground to have a local development. So it’s really cool if you’re developing a plugin, but not in the realm of a website, just on a separate folder. And then you can do playground CLI and then it opens up a WordPress instance right from that and knows it’s coming from a plugin. So it puts all the stuff from right in there into the playground. It installs it and activates it. And really fast development. Now that was previous was WP now and now it’s the Playground CLI and it’s documented. And the second one was the document guidelines on how to get new social icons into Core and have the link to the developer blog article by Justin Tadlock on how to do it yourself. What else? I think that I have the feeling we are now at the end of Gutenberg 21.4.

Sarah Norris: 

Yes, success.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And we are coming to Gutenberg 21.5. Do you want to start again?

Gutenberg 21.5

Sarah Norris: Yes, I can do. Yeah. 

Enhancements

Starting at enhancements again. So first up is Data Form. Panel layout can open as dropdown or modal. So I think this is adding the. The modal panel type to the data form. And yeah, it basically means that a panel can be opened as a modal, making the data form more flexible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, indeed. Yeah. And then the data views also get an additional enhancement as the option is now added to allow Infinite Scroll. On Data Views, you can decide between pagination or infinite scroll like we have in the media library. There’s an Infinite Scroll Infinite scroll kind of way. So yeah, it kind of opens up a lot more possibilities for Core or plugin developers to use that.

Sarah Norris: Next up is the block library section. First up is the query title, adding a post type label variation. So this adds a post type label to the query title block, which displays the singular name of the query post type.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you know, when you look at it, oh, this is a recipe or this is a post or this is a page. When it kind of comes into the query loop, that’s definitely helpful, kind of prevents confusion. Definitely, yeah. And then of course we come to your accordion block.

Sarah Norris: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it still experimental or has it been removed? Experimental.

Sarah Norris: It’s still experimental at the moment. So it’s only just been merged. Yeah. So we’re still testing. So the best thing about blocks being experimental is that we can make breaking changes, essentially. So I think it will be experimental until hopefully not the last minute. But, you know, the last minute being the last few weeks, probably before 6.9. But I think I’m feeling really confident about the block in general. So hopefully just after a few rounds of testing, maybe some tweaks being made. There’s already been a bunch of. A bunch of PRs opened for some small tweaks as well, which is really nice to see. So, yeah, hopefully it’ll be. It’ll be stabilized by 6.9. That’d be great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, I hope, I hope so very much though. Yeah. So the accordion block is. It’s implementing the HTML standard kind of way and then how it kind of works with blocks and you have a whole panel and then you have additional accordion. You have an accordions. It’s not a accordions block, but it’s a whole accordion. And then the accordion items, and then you have inner blocks that can house any content in the accordion item panels, right?

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s where I got stuck as well, because I was like, this is multiple accordions. No, it’s one accordion and then the accordion is made up of multiple sections. Yeah. And then we have to have accordion content and then the accordion header and accordion panel. And within the panel you can add. I think it’s. I think it’s all blocks. I should know, shouldn’t I? But yeah, you can add any, any content within that panel. It just makes it a little bit more flexible than the details block. But I know that the accordion and the details block are very, very similar also at the moment. I think the details block will be surfaced if you search for accordion as well in the block editor. My plan, in my head at the moment, I probably need to write this down somewhere, is that once the accordion block, the new block is stabilized, then we could remove that accordion keyword from the details block. So both of those are two very obvious distinct blocks. 

Hopefully reduce some confusion. I think the main issue is with the details uses a summary element and I don’t think it’s semantically correct to add headings, but maybe a bunch of other stuff as well. Basically you can only really technically add text content, which doesn’t make it very flexible. And then the accordion block will have, at the moment only has an option for one type of icon. But the idea is that we’re going to add a lot more customization to the icon and making the header content itself more flexible. So yeah, hopefully this accordion block is much more flexible and just it’s kind of like an advanced block compared to the details. And I think, I think they can both exist fine. They’re both, they’re both HTML paradigms. They can both exist as blocks as well. And you know, more blocks. We need more blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: More blocks, yes, definitely. Yeah, yeah. There were also some you you weren’t able in the details block, you were also not able to. To style the summary separately from the details. So if you put a border around you, it almost was on the same on the whole thing and not on the single. On the details. Yeah, or if you want to have a text styling on the summary, it also would bleed through the details. So yeah, but that’s wanted I think the details and summary that comes also from Markdown which so you could use it on GitHub and all that and there it really can have additional styling. So the accordion block is definitely for much richer styling and designs available. So are you thinking about handling transforms from details to accordions?

Sarah Norris: I haven’t thought of that yet, but that makes perfect sense because I imagine. Well, this is only a guess, but I imagine some people have. Users have been using the details block for probably what they would have wanted to use an accordion block for like if they wanted additional styling or for like more advanced FAQ sections and stuff like that. So yes, I imagine that will be a want transforming from a details block to the accordion. So yeah, I’ll add it to the list.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Write it down. All right, the next one is again it’s on the component section and there are a few in there. But I just wanted to point out the forms component that it also now supports an async validation. It means that you can also do server side validation and supports that with a. It’s a breaking change for this. It’s a private component so we shouldn’t even talk about that. Okay, so I didn’t see that but it’s. Yeah, it has an async story. So you can have an async validation. Yes, maybe sooner or later we get the public, but yeah, we’ll see.

Sarah Norris: For themes, there is additional support for providing the border radius presets. So yeah, if you’re familiar with other presets that you can have in theme JSON for styling, this is one for Border Radius allows you to set border radius presets and then they’re available in the different controls and it also uses the spacing sizes is like a modal for the way the presets use as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, if you are a themer, you definitely want to control the border radius and have users use just the certain numbers for it. Yeah, so if you use a smaller one then it’s always 15, and it’s not one is 12 and the other one is 17 or something like that. And then if you want a bigger radius for 25 or something like you don’t want to kind of that users put in all above 20, so to speak. So you have. You have a more consistent design on your site. And even if you kind of let the users use Border Radius for certain things for designing the next one is. Well, I think. Well, just want to say that the presets for Border Radius is definitely a big thing for theme developers. Yeah, I really get that. 

The next one is actually a really big thing for anybody who uses WordPress because the command palette comes to the admin dashboard. So you can actually be anywhere in your WordPress admin and then say open Site editor or add page or open style book or something like that. So you don’t have to find the menu. Click 15 times through the menu to find that particular piece there. Or say add CSS. I don’t know if that’s a command yet, but it definitely should be. So it’s a much easier way. And a lot of people might actually appreciate that they can do shortcuts pretty much to get to wherever they need to do. For the power users, it’s definitely an improvement. And I also can see there is. In the roadmap, there was also. That’s actually part of the roadmap that the command palette is available for the admin dashboard. But it’s also a foundational piece to get also AI using some of the commands and also to add. To have plugin use add commands to it that are not connected to the site editor. So plugin developers actually can streamline their processes as well for their users. Yeah, it’s nice. Yeah, it’s cool. Yeah. And I think now we have. Yeah, there’s a media for you. Do you want to go.

Sarah Norris: I can do for the block library, the median text block. So this is retain use featured image hook value during transformations. So I think this is a bug fix that fixes the media and text transformations to and from a cover block. Basically ensures that the use featured image value is retained during the transformation, which is very important. Don’t want to be resetting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s very important. And kind of adds. Removes an additional step people have to think about. So I already did this. Why do I have to do it again?

Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: After they migrated. We are at the end of Gutenberg 21.5. Yes, we did it, Sarah. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Now we have one section left in our podcast that’s the what’s in active development or discussed. And as I said in the intro we need more blocks. 

More Blocks

Matias Ventura, lead architect of Gutenberg and the whole revamping of the admin design, he posted an issue called New Blocks Editions for the Block Library. And there’s a lot of discussions that we would need there if we need them or not need them. But he comes from a point where he says, okay, for theme to have a good create a good experience for their users, it would be helpful to have these kinds of blocks or some, some of them or all of them in there. So there is no doubt that when a theme styles a block or uses it in patterns or in template parts or something like that, that it’s not going to be there. And that’s the experience now that if users use some other block, a theme that assumes there are blocks in there, they get a very confusing message there that so and so block wasn’t installed if they want to install it or something like that. And I think that’s for any new user of the WordPress could work inside editor are not very helpful. And so there are some suggested blocks there. Amongst them, the icons block, the playlist block, the slider, slider or carousel block, a stretchy text block, tabs block, accordion block. We have that Mega menus, math ML block, marquee block, table of content, time to read breadcrumbs and dialogue block. That’s kind of the list. I think it can go on and on and on, but I think it’s a good list there. I felt I’m a little bit okay, the marquee block. Didn’t we outphase that in the, in the 90s already? But I think it comes in handy when you have a news sticker across the top or something like that. MathML I think it’s a good block for educational sites, especially in math education. So I don’t know if that needs to be in the core or it can still be a plugin. Actually, Adam Silverstein created a plugin with the MathML block or the breadcrumbs block. Definitely important because that’s so important that we can help people find their way back. So a lot of people chime in. Aaron Jorban, Mike McAllister, Jeff Paul, Rich Tabor, Joe Dalston, Hendrik Larsen, Jeff Chandler yeah, a lot of people kind of join me in.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, it’s great to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: What do you think?

Sarah Norris: It’s great to see so much interaction and conversation about new blocks. I think generally most people think that we should have more blocks, but I think the contention comes down to per block and which one should be added. And I think that’s fine. I think that it’s fine to have a discussion per block about that. But at the moment I think the lack of blocks just limits the flexibility and design opportunities in the editor. So that’s where maybe the decision process is a little bit easier for things like the accordion block, because it’s such an obvious design choice and option to have. Similar to the tabs block, probably the carousel block icons. But then there’s others like you mentioned about MathML maybe would have less users, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in core. It’s probably just a longer conversation or maybe it doesn’t make it into core. I’m not sure how I feel about the marquee block because I think it’d be really fun to have a marquee block. But I also understand that maybe, you know, not. Not everyone would want to use it. So maybe it doesn’t warrant going in. But then it’s fun, isn’t it?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah, there’s fun.

Sarah Norris: I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I have also seen that there’s a developers and user usability. People don’t like sliders and carousels.

Sarah Norris: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But users or site owners like them very much. Yeah, exactly. So I talked with a few and at WordCamp US I talked with a few agency owners, said, yeah, that’s one of the blocks that we built ourselves because we need it on every single project that we are doing. Yeah. I can’t keep them kind of say, okay, there are alternatives when they want it. You know, our customers want them and so we build them.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And they’re pretty good to. They’re pretty navigational things, so interactive things. So if the site has no activity at all, this is actually getting you back.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. And so many of these blocks listed in this issue that Matias opened, so many of them already have so much work. They already have a PR or. And they’ve probably just stalled the same question of how do we do this? Why should we do this? Do we need this block? So I think it’s just a case of going through each block and having that conversation. Because the accordion block, I only picked it up and finished it. Jeff had done. Already done so much good work on that and that’s why it was able to be landed so quickly and yeah. In a similar position with many of the others. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think the table of contents has received quite a few iterations.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And just a few pieces missing that would make it a little bit more a little easier to handle, but we all kind of found our ways around it. But for that, we always have to install Gutenbergs to have the blocks there. And not everyone wants to use Gutenberg in production. Yeah, still. 

All right. Okay. So we are coming to the end of our Gutenberg Changelog podcast. As always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast and if you have questions, suggestions, or news that you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenburgtimes.com Thank you so much, Sarah, for being here, and thank you to all the listeners for listening. And if you want to review our podcast on several of those directories, like on Apple or on Spotify, please do, as it helps other people to discover it. So thank you for listening, and goodbye and see you at the next one.

Sarah Norris: Bye.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Bye.

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